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Turn around Point, move ahead six spaces

67 Gray Street has reached the apex of its trajectory. No longer is it rocketing into the dumpster bin by bin, but now its soaring to new levels of energy efficiency after 170 years of chilling and overheating it’s victims within.

One hundred and seventy years “this old house” held itself up even after careless and incompetent men had removed main bearing columns, cut away floor joists, and notched joists without thought or hesitation.

The post and beam structure itself has its own set of issues that over time can be seen as workings of gravity against wood, mortise and tenon, and live loading.

This old house is seeing a top down approach, the third floor, then the 2nd floor, then the first…etc. At this point we have remedied structural issues like over spanned rafters, lack of structural ties, off center loading of beams and columns.

Further… we have insulated the roof up to a R-38, we have remedied head height problems in door heights and ceiling heights. The electrical contractor is in the process of rewiring the whole place.

The plumber is re-plumbing the building to modern codes (meaning no metal pipes, but a lot of them due to venting all fixtures!).

Perhaps one of the biggest turnarounds is that the windows have been decided upon…yes! Michael Morrill has decided to hire Northstar woodworking to build them. A little bit of background, Steven Morrill, Jon and Michael’s brother is a co-partner of Northstar, so its keeping the work and money ‘in the family’. The Historic folks we hope will be happy about this too. Its keeping the window manufacturing in the area and if that is not Historically important than what is?

Like with all things that really matter in this world there must be patience, diligence, hardships, trials, and then more patience….In the end you build something that is worthy, better then previous, and hopefully with new vision as to how it could be better for us all then previous iterations had proven not.

Although we are not near done by any stretch, we are closer. And that’s just going to have to be the new motto for those of us who work on ‘This old ____’n House’ .

You cant turn 170 years of History around in a day, reiterate…a month….or two, or three…

In the meantime Emily, Jon, and Mark all wait for some new help …and they are coming (Silas, and friend) this week brought by Mike….Yeay! Bring the boys we have plenty of work…and no shortage of dust to vacuum. Next blog Here